


Annibal the Cannibal

by SparringWoodpecker



Category: St Trinian's (2007 2009)
Genre: F/F, POV First Person, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-05
Updated: 2020-08-05
Packaged: 2021-03-06 01:01:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,842
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25734748
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SparringWoodpecker/pseuds/SparringWoodpecker
Summary: Where does the nickname really come from?
Relationships: Annabelle Fritton/Kelly Jones, Annabelle Fritton/OC
Comments: 1
Kudos: 17





	Annibal the Cannibal

“Annibal the Cannibal” the words hissed around the pitch. Annibal the cannibal. The bane of my existence.  
Kelly turned to me. “What’s that about?”  
I fidgeted with the handle of my lacrosse stick. “Oh, nothing,” I tried to airily breeze it off. My chest felt tight. I couldn’t look away from the already torn up ground. “I used to have braces and bits of food would get stuck in them.” My heart thudded. The hissing continued.  
The whistle blew.  
I gratefully retreated to my starting position.  
Verity Thwaites. Of course, I wouldn’t have the luck to escape her.  
Never in my time at Cheltenham had I had a fixture with St Trinian's, though I’m not sure how as our headmistresses seem to be on… terms. However, the minute I switch schools, Thwaites somehow finds a way for her torment to follow.  
For most of the game, I endeavoured to stay as far away as I could. It had been a strategy that had predominantly worked at Cheltenham before anyway.  
Verity was a natural bully. Every school has one, or a handful. It’s made worse when you live together. Her unchecked privilege and anger issues had set her on the course of school bully from the moment I had set foot into Cheltenham. She was not, however, my bully at the start.  
Head down, I lived, head down I played.  
It was a vicious game. More vicious than any match I had ever taken part in before, including the St Trinians’ practice matches, which were not exactly known for their rule-abiding. It was made worse by the fact that Matron had subbed in as referee and didn’t appear to have a handle on the rules, the players, or the whistle, and wasn’t even biased in our favour to make up for that. Though maybe that was to her merit. Or another commentary on her lack of understanding of lacrosse.  
The side-lines were roaring with chanting girls. The chants were borderline appropriate, a number definitely crossing it when urged by the actions on the pitch.  
Then the ball was at my feet. The goal was in front of me. Vaguely I heard someone – Kelly maybe – yelling at me to shoot. But there between me and the goal was Thwaites.  
She bared her gumshield and snarled “you’re dead, cannibal.”  
I froze.  
Cannibal.  
Cannibal.  
Cannibal.  
Laughter. Laughter, looking down on me. My skin tingling, almost beyond feeling as volts coursed through my arm, jolting me from sleep. Shoving me to the ground.  
I landed with a thud. The bystanders in a frenzy. I gazed up long legs to Kelly. Kelly swinging her stick with a vicious cry. The ball flew straight forward, an attack on Thwaites and not the goal. More violence in the game. The aim to inflict pain and humiliation.  
The crack snapped around the pitch and I stared at Thwaites falling to the mud.  
I didn’t even notice the ball fall into the goal, or the whistle blow to end the game until Kelly had lapped the pitch and was standing above me again.  
Ripping my eyes away from the clamour of people around Verity, I was confronted with long legs again until I refocused on the hand that Kelly had held out to me. Taking it, she hauled me to my feet. I opened my mouth to say something, but she was already being carried away in the celebrations.  
The ambulance came for Verity. The rest of Cheltenham watched me watching with distrusting and disgusted eyes, though no one dared say anything on St Trinians’ turf without Thwaites there to back them up.  
I breathed a sigh of relief when their bus finally left. Only then did I make my way to the changing rooms. The completely empty changing rooms. St Trinian's was already setting up for the party by the time Cheltenham had got in, and I wasn’t about to go in there alone.  
“How about a drink, Fritton,” Kelly said when I finally made my way down to the party already in swing.  
“Oh, no, I–”  
“Are you a St Trinian's or not?”  
“I bet she’s never even drunk before,” one of the other girls said.  
Meeting challenging eyes, I grabbed the shot from Kelly and downed it before snatching a beer bottle from someone else and taking a healthy swig of that too.  
With a little murmur, and a few exchanged hands, everyone went back to the party. I thought, I hoped, maybe Kelly would stay, but she didn’t. though the small nod of approval made me feel like the alcohol was soaking in quicker than physically possible.  
The night progressed. I watched Kelly at the centre of everyone’s attention, in the middle of a mass of bodies. I stayed to the side-lines, nursing my bottle, then another.  
I hadn’t been drinking since…  
Since that night last year.  
In a dormitory with a girl like Verity, it’s always best to at least attempt to get along. All of us had rubbed along for years. If Verity was picking on you one day, then you could at least live with the knowledge that it would be someone else the next day, that everyone else in the dorm would step in to shield you from her wrath so it spread over everyone and didn’t hit one person too hard. At least no one in our dorm. Unlike at St Trinian's, we had form segregated dorms, so if she decided to take issue with a girl from another form, that was on them. There was only so much Thwaites management we could do.  
So when Verity pulled out a bottle of vodka on one of her few pleasant days, we all knew it was the test of who would bare her ill-will next. She devised various games, all aimed to humiliate, even on her better days she wasn’t without a mean streak. But we bore it, and the alcohol helped.  
I had had a particularly bad run that week, having gotten a few questions on a test wrong which Thwaites had apparently been cheating off me on. I was determined to make it back into favour, so I drank far more and participated more willingly in her games.  
In the early hours, I ended up in the infirmary, lying about a stomach bug to the matron’s apprentice, Jemima, a girl barely out of St Miriam’s. She never confirmed it, but I’m entirely certain she knew it wasn’t a stomach bug. But as a potentially infectious twenty-four-hour sickness, I was confined to the infirmary with Jemima.  
Jemima.  
The party was still going on when I slipped up to bed. Even the first years were still scream all hell over the music. If there’s one thing you learn quickly about boarding schools, it’s that no matter how good you think you are at hiding things, someone else is better at finding them, so never write a diary. If it’s a single bit of paper, it’s easier to conceal though. I slipped a note from behind the dustcover of one book, and a picture from the lining of my pencil case. Jemima’s face smiled up at me, hand waving the camera away as she looked up from her desk in the infirmary. My fingers trailed down the edge of the photopaper, already beginning to soften from the number of times I had touched it. More carefully, I unfolded the note. Her precise, italicised script was much too little and I could already see it in my mind without the physical copy present.  
Annabelle.  
8.30 the usual place.  
J X

The bed dipped behind me.  
“Enjoy your first St Trinians’ party, Annibal the Cannibal?”  
I stiffened.  
“Don’t.”  
“Don’t what?”  
Light fingers plucked the photo from my lap.  
“Hey, give that back!” I turned to confront Kelly.  
“Who is it?”  
“No one.”  
“You have a picture of no one?”  
I refused to respond. It was a conscious choice, not a lack of words.  
Kelly examined the picture. In the half-light of a lamp from the far side of the dorm, I could trace an achingly similar silhouette to the one I would creep out to rendezvous with last year. The dark bobbed hair, the angular jaw, the straight nose that didn’t stick up unlike mine.  
This deja vu feeling left me reeling. So much so, I didn’t think when Kelly jokingly said, “this one of your victims, cannibal?”  
“According to Verity.”  
Kelly leant back, regarding me. I felt regarded. I didn’t know if I liked the feeling. It was a cross between over-exposed anxiety and a weird, tummy turning excitement.  
“You should get some sleep,” Kelly said, patting the picture back down into my lap.  
“Right.” Kelly began sauntering away. “Jemima,” I called after her. She looked over her shoulder, eyebrow raised. I waved the picture. “Her name. Jemima.”  
The next day, classes were empty, and it was an assault course through corridors of passed out bodies, not all of whom attended the school, to get anywhere.  
It seemed the teachers had also partaken in the celebration as I was the only one to turn up to French. Even Madam wasn’t there.  
I sat, idly flicking through the heavily graffitied exercise book, wondering if the day would be a complete waste, when Kelly came in.  
“I thought you might be here.”  
“It’s lesson time,” I replied, wincing just a little as I heard the primness through my dull headache. Perhaps I had drunk more than I thought.  
Kelly looked more put together than anyone who had been partying all night had any right to look. Her lipstick was impeccable. I was staring.  
“Well, Fritton?”  
“What?”  
Kelly smirked.  
“Where’s the usual place? I wasn’t aware cannibals had usual places.” She slipped up onto one of the desks, high-heeled shoes kicked out before her, grazing the edge of my own desk.  
“I think we should establish that no matter how blasé you might be about scalping people, I’m not a murderer.”  
“No, you’re a cannibal.”  
“Semantics.”  
Kelly leant back, waiting me out.  
I thought I was stubborn. I thought I was stubborn until I met Kelly Jones.  
“Jemima was the assistant matron at Cheltenham. Verity caught me in a … compromising position with her.”  
I gulped heavily as Kelly slowly leant forward, elbow on the corner of my desk and chin in her hand.  
“We might make a St Trinian of you yet,” Kelly appraised.  
She abruptly stood and headed towards the door. “Come find me in my usual place after your meeting with the headmistress.”  
“My… What?” I stood to follow, to ask more, but she was already gone, leaving only the echo of her heels.  
What just happened? What did that mean? What meeting with Auntie? If there was one thing to say about St Trinian's, it was that you’d only find out anything by just going along with it and hoping for the best. I guess that’s what I intended to do. And the seductive look on Kelly’s face certainly did little to dissuade that notion.


End file.
